Super Bowl advertising and social media
Analyzing one ad
Last year, Volkswagen's Darth Vader ad was the biggest hit of the Super Bowl commercials. But game day viewing was just one segment of the video's marketing. Today the video has more than 50 million views on YouTube on top of the 111-million record audience that watched Super Bowl 2011.
This year's sequel was again larger than the game itself. To kick off the campaign, Volkswagon released a link to an extended version of the new ad and embedded it in the previous year's YouTube video before Super Bowl Sunday.
Social Buzz Before Game
This year's ad wasn't just launched before the Super Bowl. It started with a teaser YouTube video posted on January 18th called "The Bark Side" with dogs barking Darth Vader's theme. "Watch our game day ad," the copy below the video explained. "It will all make sense."
Then came "The Dog Strikes Back," which sticks with the cute and clever themes with an overweight dog that gets in shape to chase after a Volkswagen. It already had more than 3 million views on YouTube the day before this year's Super Bowl, and pundits discussed its tactics and evaluated its effectiveness before it even hit television. But not counting "The Bark Side," this year's Volkswagen Super Bowl ad fell short of less than a quarter of pre-game views of its 2011 predecessor, whose recrod was eclipsed by Acura this year for most views before the game.
In the Chicago Tribune, Steve Johnson inteviewed experts that said most advertisers are trading the element of surprise during the Super Bowl to get the most bang for their buck out of blockbuster ads that are expensive to produce and air. The general manager of brand marketing at Volkswagen of America had this to say:
For a marketer, "the Super Bowl is really not a game on a Sunday anymore. The Super Bowl is almost a three-week PR and social media campaign, and you have to think of it that way."
It's hard to pull off a sequel to any popular original, but prior to the game the buzz is favorable toward Volkswagen. The new view has more than 14,000 likes to "only" a few hundred dislikes on YouTube. Anticipating the debate about which year's ad was better in living rooms, bars and across social media, the advertisement goes meta at the end and features a Star Wars parody of this discussion.
Social buzz during and after Super Bowl
As shown in the meta sequence of the ad, people immediately sounded off in social media about which year's ad was better and if the Star Wars sequence improved or made the advertisement worse.
On Twitter, Volkswagen featured a custom brand landing page (reported costing $25,000) to post a stillshot of its video and to show the hashtag #DogStrikesBack. The Twitter account posted the video (with more than 40) retweets and retweeted comments favorable about the ad.
Interestingly, if you Googled "volkswagen ad" after the Super Bowl, you also saw paid advertisements for Chevy and Mazda, which must have also bid on (and drove up the price of) the paid search key words.
On YouTube the video jumped a million views from the previous day to more than 4 million with a 97% favorable rating. If you went to Volkswagen's Facebook page, a custom landing tab greeted the visitor with embedded videos from last year's ad, "The Bark Side," this year's Super Bowl ad and even a 6 1/2-minute making-of video complete with director's commentary ("the dog is a metaphor.."), "interviews" with the animal talent, demonstration of the fat suit worn by the dog and more.
According to Facebook, more than 21,000 people were talking about the brand after the Super Bowl, including more than 2,000 likes and 300 shares of their wall post with the ad. Volkswagen's page also actively posted on other page's wall. In the Facebook/ USA Today Super Bowl ad meter - where the public and view and rate all the commercials - the Volkawagen ad ranked 6th after the game in a close contest with an average of 4.21 out of 5 stars.
As for the newest social media player, Google Plus seemed to be an afterthought, even though viewers gave their videos received thousands of +1s. But on Google Plus itself Volkswagen posted some previews leading up to the Super Bowl placement, but never linked to the actual video like they did on Facebook and Twitter. That's another telling signs that most brands haven't bought into Google Plus even for high-profile campaigns that saturate social media.
What did they get right and what would you have done different?
In retrospect, releasing the advertisement ahead of time seems like a savvy move. Looking at comments on Facebook, it appears that people who previously saw the ads were excited to actually see it on the big stage. (Though many were confused why they didn't see "The Bark Side" during the game.) It also crates a possible effect of those who saw it ahead of time alerting friends and family to watch it when it came on during the game, so it stands out for a wider audience rather than getting lost in the deluge of game, ads and halftime show.
From a public sentiment aspect, it appears to be a success. What is less clear is the ROI of this effort. Volkswagen spent millions and millions of dollars on this ad, since NBC was charging $3.5 million per 30 second spot alone, to say nothing of the cost of production, marketing and PR dollars added to the campaign. Will the huge Super Bowl audience plus the echo effect from the blanket social media coverage help justify the spending?
The director of this year's ad believes that the commercial symbolizes Volkswagen being back and better than ever. The company's bottom line will tell if a Super Bowl ad helped prove this to be true, or if the public just likes to be entertained by cute and cuddly dogs while watching football.
